1. Should the Mac port of the game be an Intel app, Apple Silicon app, or Universal/both?:
Obviously a Universal app that supports both would be ideal, but if I had to pick one, I think Apple Silicon would be better. We're just over 50 months removed from the first release of Apple Silicon Macs, and they already have the majority of the Mac marketshare according to the most recent Steam hardware survey. They seem to be gaining about a percentage point every month.
| Processor | '22 Sep | '22 Oct | '22 Nov | '22 Dec | '23 Jan |
| VirtualApple | 48.56% | 49.83% | 50.87% | 51.15%
| 52.31% |
| GenuineIntel | 51.42%
| 50.14%
| 49.10% | 48.82% | 47.66% |
Source:
Steam hardward surveyIf you made it an Intel app, it should be able to be emulated on the current Apple Silicon Macs with Rosetta 2, but this would only delay the need for an Apple Silicon build since Apple is unlikely to keep Rosetta 2 around forever. And wouldn't it be cool to see how well a native Apple Silicon build could perform compared to an AMD64 build?
2. What should the target minimum required operating system version be?:
If Dwarf Fortress will only support Apple Silicon, this is kind of a moot point, since they only support 3 versions of macOS so far, and I think XCode automatically will compile builds that will support the latest 2 OS versions by default, which will probably cover like all Apple Silicon Mac users according to the Steam survey.
If you decide to support Intel Macs, then you might possibly consider supporting older versions of macOS. The current Mac build of Dwarf Fortress supports Mac OS 10.6 Leopard and later. I do not expect the upcoming Mac build to support such old operating systems, though. I think macOS 10.14 Mojave would be a good choice of target for the minimum supported version.
Mojave is the second-oldest operating system supported by the latest version of XCode, so with Apple's pattern Mojave should still see support in the next version of XCode as well. Additionally, Mojave is the last version of macOS to support older 32-bit apps, so this version may have some holdouts from people who have some 32-bit app(s) they love and reluctant to upgrade. And there's likely a few 3rd-party utilities for the Mac version of Dwarf Fortress that are still only available in 32-bit. Fortunately, Dwarf Therapist is 64-bit, but I'm not very familiar with the other utilities. (Disclaimer: My primary laptop is on Mojave, so very biased here.)
Percentage of Users on different versions of macOS as of 2023 January:
| macOS version | Pct. of Mac users |
| 13 - Big Sur (2022) | >39.9% |
| 12 - Monterey (2021) | >29.1% |
| 10.15 - Catalina (2019) | >5.8% |
| 10.14 - Mojave (2018) | >2.7% |
| 10.13 - High Sierra (2017) | >3.5% |
(Note: Steam hardware survey doesn't provide complete data and only shows top results of very specific versions, so percentages may be higher than what can be counted in the public survey results.)
Source:
Steam hardware survey
P.S. - if you need someone to test if Mac development builds will run, I have several Macs lying around running various versions of Mac OS. I can even borrow an M2 Mac to test something for some quick tests.
